The Age of Menzel. Drawings by German Masters of the 19th Century.
From works taken to Russia after Second World War illem de Kooning. Late Paintings

On 15 September 2006 an exhibition opened in the Twelve-Column Hall of the Winter Palaceã displaying more than 100 works of graphic art that came to the Hermitage from various collections around Germany including items that were taken to Russia after the Second World War. The exhibition continues the policy of showing art works that for a long time remained inaccessible to researchers and museum visitors.

The name A.F.E. von Menzel links the Age of Romanticism with the period of Expressionism in German fine arts. The years of Adolf Menzel's life marked an important period, one might say a turning point in German history: from the end of the war of liberation in 1815 to 1905, the eve of the First World War. The exhibition presents 19 works dating from the early 1840s to the middle of the 1890s. These illustrate the multi-faceted career of Adolf Menzel. Among them, one finds in particular a group portrait of the family of a friend of the artist - The Family of Doctor Pulman - which was done in the fashion of a genre painting, and the portrait of Baron Alexander von Ungern-Sternberg, the writer and publicist, as well as the pastel drawing The Dancer Pepita de Oliva. The exhibition is rounded out by works of Adolf Menzel's contemporaries.

More than 40 of the drawings on display were part of the so-called collection of Dr. Friedrich Lukanus. Most of the drawings from this collection are linked with the Dusseldorf School. One can see in the exhibition a work by the director of the Dusseldorf Academy of Arts Wilhelm Schadow and drawings of his first students: Julius Huebner, Ferdinand Theodor Hildebrandt, Carl Ferdinand Sohn, Eduard Bendemann and Carl Friedrich Lessing. The Lukanus collection also includes works of the Munich masters Domenico Quaglio, Maximilian Johann Gearg von Dillis, Johann Jakob Dorner and Wilhelm von Kaulbach, as well as artists who worked in Dresden - Gustav Heinrich Naecke, Adrian Ludwig Richter and Gustav Ferdinand Metz. From among works by Berlin masters, ther is a landscape by Karl Friedrich Schinkel.

An illustrated scholarly catalogue to the exhibition has been prepared and published (State Hermitage Publishing House, 2006). The author of the catalogue and curator of the exhibition is Michail Dedinkin, senior researcher of the Department of the History of Western European Art in the State Hermitage.

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At the exhibition

The exhibition catalogue